I've been trying to install Ubuntu 10.04 on my Dell workstation and am unable to get the Grub-2 bootloader to load properly. It seems to be failing for lack of a floppy drive on the system resulting in an error message that reads :

error: fd0 cannot get C/H/S values.

I've gone through the Grub-2 page at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2 to no avail and other sources having similar problems have likewise turned up no solutions. I would certainly appreciate any insight, here's the background:

A while back I was trying to install a different version of Linux and had the same problems, then had to set the project aside for a bit. I don't think this has anything to do with Linux or Ubuntu per se, but rather Grub.

The system is an old (4-5 years) Dell workstation that has one drive (128 GB) set up for Windows XP and a second new drive (500GB) which I installed for Linux. There is a DVD/CD drive and the system contains no floppy drive at all. In one attempt to get this working I tried modifying the BIOS to indicate there was a floppy drive - this created a failure earlier in the chain with the BIOS failing to load properly, not unexpected, just a shot in the dark at that point.

At the moment I am considering just running out to buy and install a cheap floppy drive to see if that helps. I'll never use the thing though so I'd rather find a solution that doesn't require me to spend money on useless hardware.

2 Answers
2

Is there a setting in your BIOS for floppy emulation? If so, try turning it on, and it might solve (or at least workaround) the issue. If not, check for a "legacy USB" or similar option that makes the BIOS not start USB devices, and that might help. When you modified the BIOS to indicate there was a floppy drive, and it errored, what exactly did you do, and what exactly happened?

From what I can tell, the error can be caused by certain BIOSes reporting usb devices as floppies. Grub then tries to probe for a floppy, and doesn't find an actual one, and borks. Assuming this is what is going on, it's supposedly fixed in grub-1.98-1 -- although upgrading to that may be more of a pain than it's worth.

Putting a floppy in the system might solve the issue, I'm honestly not sure. It seems like it would, but that's a pretty nasty workaround.

Try turning the floppy controller off completely in the BIOS. It may be trying to initialize a device that doesn't exist. If GRUB can't see a controller, it shuold naturally do nothing at all about floppy.